David T. Owsley Museum of Art (BSU.EDU/DOMA)
"Rising to the Surface: Paintings by Debbie Ma" solo museum show features over twenty works in two exhibition galleries spanning several decades. Her large abstract paintings explore the vocabulary of texture and create a tapestry of quiet patterns in marble dust and pigments.
Debbie Ma’s abstract paintings are marked by their sense of order, balance, and a surface dynamism informed by her studies in graphic design and inspired by a cross-section of modern masters. Her use of white and its variants evoke ancient walls and sculptures, Italian frescoes, as well as paintings by American Minimalist Robert Ryman and Spanish artist Miquel Barceló.
Ma’s choice of materials, such as her signature medium of marble dust, lends her paintings a reflective quality, sculptural effect, and, as in Antoni Tàpies’s later works, a sense of “meditative emptiness.” Ma notes how “Working with stone, albeit in powder form, demands the same physicality as carving. I always describe my paintings as two-dimensional sculptures because a lot of effort is made to create volume and thickness.”
Ma speaks many languages and filters them into her work, which is both varied and consistent, preoccupied as she is with materials and their surprising effects. There are Cy Twombly-like marks, calligraphic jottings, and Jackson Pollock–evoking gestures and layering. She says she is fascinated with grids (but not too tightly administered) and can’t resist patterning and surface textures. Her use of geometry suggests how we view and measure what we see.
This three month long solo artist exhibition at the David T. Owsley Museum of Art (DOMA) (bsu.edu/doma) is an important milestone in her lifetime career as an independent painter.
Rising to the Surface: Paintings by Debbie Ma
Solo Exhibition at the David T. Owsley Museum of Art | September 28 thru December 21, 2023 | Essay by Barbara MacAdam
Debbie Ma’s work speaks a subtle and distinctive language of today. Ma has devised a vocabulary of style embracing modernism, geometry, and the art history of her time in works as disparate as painting, drawing, and even photography. The Long Island–based artist speaks many languages and filters them into her work, which is at once varied and consistent. She is preoccupied with materials and their surprising effects. At the same time, stylistically, she says, she is fascinated with grids, albeit not too strictly adhered to, but nevertheless inescapable: she can’t resist patterning and surface textures. And her agile use of geometry suggests how we view and measure what we see.
Ma's use of white and its variants evokes ancient walls and sculptures, Italian frescoes, as well as the paintings of contemporaries such as Spanish artist Miquel Barceló, who, through his surfaces engages the power of white, and, of course, the Minimalist painter Robert Ryman.
We inevitably associate her subtle white and cream tone paintings with Ryman’s. Like Ryman, Ma has created effects through the textural use of white, establishing a sense of energy beneath the elegant surface. As for her process, she quotes Jasper Johns, who modestly explains of his work: “You just take something, and then you do something to it. And then something else. Keep this up and pretty soon you've got something! “
She has thus made her own journey into art history and culture, uniting the tools, materials, and spirit of East and West. We sense the power of Giorgio Morandi in the barely perceptible shifts in tone and shape among forms in her paintings, and their ability to gradually develop their presence as in the marble dust on canvas paintings Pleudaniel (2021) and Beneath the Moon (2018). And we can detect a Zenlike composure and modesty in her stretches of white fields with raised markings that hint at her own internal landscape and experience of the land.
We might, of course, think about Cy Twombly in the scribbled reference to writing and poetry she creates in the painting Street Talk (2022). As with Twombly’s paintings, Ma takes us on her journey through her time and space. She leads us from the concrete to the ephemeral as her materials and very subtle sense of color enable her to express herself through such unusual substances as marble dust, a powder that lends her work a reflective quality and creates a sculptural effect. Working intuitively among genres, Ma’s art is rich and nuanced.
She has explained, “The inspiration for these works is not so much the outside world or trending ideas, but the painting itself and the materials I use. The challenge is to tame a medium and make it succumb to what I want it to be.”
Ma moved to New York in 1981, and in addition to an earlier Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology and Psychology, she earned a graduate degree in Communications Design in 1983 from the Parsons School of Design. Her paintings are informed not only by her studies in graphic design, marked by their sense of order and balance, but also by her quiet evocation of nature—most specifically that of the flat stretches of land that surround her home and studio on Long Island. The quiet and tranquility are at the core of much of her art. She has married the landscape into a formal plastic language.
Having worked for 25 years in product design for luxury cosmetics companies, she shifted to fine-art painting after visiting a Manhattan gallery on 57th Street that was stocked with paintings by Antoní Tápies. She was immediately drawn to the Barcelona artist’s surfaces and use of odd but appealing nontraditional materials. She decided to travel to Barcelona where she began both to experiment with new media and, most importantly, to work with a freer hand. She was becoming a truly international artist, imbuing her work with a sense of European history and atmosphere. While Tápies himself, embedded politics in his works, he later turned his art production into a reflective and more spiritual view of the world, conveying it in an at once stripped-down minimalist expression and in gruff aggressive gestures and symbols. Although Ma’s impetus was certainly not the same as his, his practice could be considered a catalyst to the formation of her own artistic sensibility.
We sense in Ma’s work a hidden intensity. She engages with the richness and compactness of surfaces and with an investigation of production and its effects. She has chosen to delve into the oeuvre of a range of artists, assembling a gathering of inspirations. Among those she claims for her poetic and intellectual circle are Anselm Kiefer with his use of texture as subject. Ma expresses a similar kind of forcefulness in her own approach to structural activity, as can be seen in her painting Reconnection (2022). Meanwhile, at the more subtle end of the spectrum, she looks toward Mark Tobey, whose intricate calligraphic mark-making creates a Zenlike atmospheric world with a sense of cosmological connections. Ma’s work, especially her precise markings, could be compared with Tobey’s “white writings,” as in her more Abstract Expressionist compositions, such as July IV (2013) and Rotations 4 (2013).
Strikingly, the way Ma divides her compositions into squares and builds with them suggests the abstract narratives of the Uruguayan-Catalonian Constructivist artist Joaquin Torres Garcia. She draws us along in language-evoking sequences like that of the fractured- style alphabets of such works as the series of three untitled works on paper from 2022.
As if to explain it all, she invokes the sentiments of Gerhard Richter, who pronounced, "I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency. I have no programme, no style, no direction. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty." Such seems to resonate with her work.
Nevertheless, Ma’s art also harbors the stuff of feelings and the imagination. By evoking the art of her predecessors and peers, she incorporates their allusions as well. She doesn’t appropriate but carefully alludes to styles, such as Pattern and Decoration in the manner of Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, in works, such as No Way Out, (2018) that evoke language, fabric, optical illusion, architecture, and cross-cultural design, and reaches back to Jackson Pollock with a painting aptly titled Jackson Pollock’s Alter Ego (2013). She digs beneath his gestures and adds order and depth to the apparent randomness.
Ma has long worked principally in monochrome, claiming her preference for neutral tones, which she considers calming, together with being driven by her keen sense of order. That said, however, she also has recently been experimenting increasingly with colors, many of which have a sculptural impasto appearance where light and texture and complimentary tones on paper produce an unexpected spontaneity as seen in her 2021 untitled pastel on paperwork breaking away from the grid.
Like so many artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Ma finds herself working in disparate styles and accommodating different content, including music, especially jazz, with her punctuated markings and interruptions. The rhythms keep us in tune with reading her works. In fact, reading is also at the heart of much of Ma’s production, as in the sense of a library, with cubes appearing as stacks of books and spaces between them hosting ideas and memories. We can see this clearly in Memoir, a marble dust painting from 2022.
But not to be forgotten is Ma’s deep connection to the design world, where she shows how to bridge the age-old design-art dichotomy and demonstrates how the elements of each converge. It is a false divide. The different kinds of balance and control of perspective inherent in both serve to guide viewers through Ma’s self-assured work and allow them to perceive it with clarity.
In this way, we can see how her evolution has taken her from evocations of the jazz world of Stuart Davis to complex spaces like the wood-tone abstraction Terra Firma II (2018) that leads us into a cubistic pyramid with a strangely shifting perspective, and to woven cloth-evoking works like Social Fabric (2019), that wrap us in their texture as if hand-printed. Such works can be experienced as repositories for thought, with slight digressions. And then, at the other end of the spectrum is Sanctuary (2022), a highly refined work in marble dust on canvas that calls to mind a Charles Sheeler painting, devoid of color, flat, precise, exquisitely structured, and architecturally suggestive.
Above all, beauty resides in the clarity of Ma’s work. It is at once straightforward, complex, and yet comforting to look at. Hers is a world of thought and connectivity that extends from the gentle to the active, from the spiritual to the intellectual.
Barbara A. MacAdam | barbara.macadam@gmail.com
Barbara A. MacAdam is an art critic and curator, who writes regularly for The Brooklyn Rail and for Art and Object, among other publications. She has been an editor of ARTnews, Art & Auction, Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, and New York Magazine.
Questions and answers: Debbie Ma, Rising to the Surface Interview with Barbara Macadam and Mary Dinaburg – March 2023
How did you first become interested in art? When did you know you wanted to pursue it? Why did you choose to go into graphic and package design as a career?
MA: For as long as I can remember, I was fascinated with the tools required to create something; not so much the finished product but what I can do with those tools. I collected crayons and paints and had a sizable hoard of papers and found objects. Art materials were my toys. Being the youngest of seven, my parents left me alone giving me all the time to play and explore. I never kept the works that I produced; I either destroyed them or gave them away. It was all about the process, and even then, I felt that art was ephemeral.
One does not become interested in art. You are born with this insatiable urge to make things and somehow people start calling it art. I feel kinship with pre-historic cave paintings because it is just that, the pure desire to make a mark on a blank surface; an undefined primal need to express oneself. And on a more complex level, “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” (a simplified interpretation of a Gnostic tenet.)
You live art, but you pursue a career. I have a degree in Psychology/Anthropology, Art Education and Communication Design. This was to ensure a means to fund an existence and whatever passions one might decide to fulfill in life. The “material question” loomed large. A career in art will not feed you. Through the help of my college professors, I was able to find employment, first in publishing then packaging design. Packaging design was very lucrative and at the same time, provided me with a creative platform to learn and experiment with two dimensional and three-dimensional designs employing various techniques and materials. It was an unplanned direction but proved worthy of the twenty-five years I spent doing it.
Who were your favorite artists when you first became interested in art?
MA: The three great icons, because they were universally known and available to me when I was growing up: van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso. But van Gogh left a lasting impression for his explosive colors and especially the texture and expressiveness of his brushstrokes. My interest in his painting style led me to discover Chaim Soutine, and Frank Auerbach, and much later, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Ryman, Antonio Tápies, Mark Bradford, Eva Hesse, and many others. The evolution of an artist’s brain takes many strange turns, but the enduring thread that I can see in my paintings is that of texture, the common characteristic that is apparent in the works of all the painters I take inspiration from.
You often say you don’t know what your work is about. What would you say, then, is the inspiration for your individual ideas when you start a work?
MA: I invoke Jasper John’s wise words, “It’s simple. You just take something, and then you do something to it. Then you do something else to it. And then something else. Keep this up and pretty soon you’ve got something.” If every artist were to honestly describe what happens in the sanctuary and privacy of their studio, they would be saying the same. The beauty of imperfection and impermanence evokes a deep emotion in me. A surface can never be too rough or a line too tortuous in my visual vocabulary. I find inspiration in old surfaces. Old walls, faded frescoes, peeling paint; creased, leathery faces etched with the ravages of time are all muses for my paintings. Because of my background in anthropology, I have great interest in primitive iconography, archaeology, and language; and my years as a graphic designer have trained my eye for modern typography and architectural forms. My paintings incorporate all these elements. I am walking down 57th Street in Manhattan, and my eye catches an image of an exposed wall obscured by a building for 150 years that was just demolished. It is caked with soot and grime, and people’s lives with stories to tell. I crop the image in my mind. There, etched on masonry, a perfect painting.
Do you think of your works primarily as locations, atmospheres or expressions of emotions or explorations of materials?
MA: Yes, to all. My paintings are consciously or unconsciously, snapshots of a mental vignette. It could be the memory of a place, an emotion, a person. The medium that I employ right now; marble dust and other stones, like basalt and granite give me the flexibility to explore three-dimensional surface textures that traditional mediums like oil paints and acrylics do not. The intrinsic quality of stone radiates expressiveness and strength, qualities I require from my paintings.
Do you think that working in packaging and graphic design for such a length of time and coming up with various solutions to design issues influences some of the decisions you make in your paintings? What is the thread that unites all your artwork together?
MA: It is difficult to change a certain way of thinking and functioning that has worked so effectively in my graphic design career. I worked on multi-pronged design projects simultaneously for different clients. Each required a different set of concepts and execution. I was used to focusing on several themes at the same time. A variety of ideas was key to successful presentations, never the same idea executed in ten different ways. The art industry, as I am learning more now, requires a certain sense of consistency. Artists are almost forced to create a “look”, an identifiable fingerprint of their work. Except for my medium, I do not see that in my body of work, nor do I intend to change. I like experimenting with images. I have such varied sources of inspirations from graphic design to forays into iconography, from my background in anthropology, years of studying Chinese calligraphy and from my own cultural heritage. What a shame to limit oneself to a particular direction. There is so much in the ether to be curious about. To quote Gerhard Richter, “I pursue no objective, no system, no tendency. I have no programme, no style, no direction. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like the continual uncertainty.” The conversation is between my painting and the viewer. I do not consciously communicate through accessible forms yet hope that the viewer recognizes the painting’s intuitive meaning. If somehow the viewer perceives a message, an emotion, an inner steering; then the work is successful. This is what unites all my pieces as varied as they might be.
How important is drawing?
MA: Drawing is the structure that makes the house. It is easier to work out ideas with a quick sketch. I always start with some sketches especially for my larger, patterned pieces. I do not employ the computer for this stage of the process. I prefer making my drawings with oil or soft pastels and gouache where there is a tactile relationship between the sketch and the painting. A computer rendering is so far removed from what I try to achieve in my work.
Do you think that literature or music influences your work as well as other visual stimuli?
MA: What is the brain but a repository of millions of stimuli. I am sure that everything I have experienced in my life has regurgitated into lumps of marble dust on canvas consciously or subconsciously. Unless one is born on an island devoid of any human contact, every idea is the product of another idea that somebody else had. A “curated” version. What is true and original however is how an artist utilizes this vast library of information to create something that is truly unique and personal.
You have had varied interests and hobbies and a long-standing career in package design, you mentioned to me that all through these years you have always painted for yourself and make work for yourself, but never considered yourself an artist until...?
MA: I have worn many hats in my lifetime. I was a teacher, a psychologist, a graphic designer, and as a prolific maker of images, I guess an artist. I never considered myself an artist in its strictest definition by stereotypical standards. I did not begin my “art” career in art school, or spend years focused only in pursuing that goal; art was a sweet companion to all the other more practical pursuits I had. I was fortunate to have had a career in package design because it was the perfect conduit for all my creative energy. It was financially viable and it gave me the platform to learn, experiment and test out visual and conceptual ideas. In a sense, it was my art school. I never considered myself an artist because I never really thought about it. Making things, creating images was just something I did. It came as easily as breathing. The irresistible urge to create, and the satisfaction of seeing the finished work was what mattered, not the label. Being that I had an ongoing career in graphic design, there was no pressure or expectation on the art that I created for myself. I was able to make whatever I wanted to make whenever I wanted to make them. It was a spontaneous and liberating process.
Through the process of putting this exhibition together you have stated more than once that this is a great gift. That having a museum exhibition is the culmination and validation you have sought. Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
MA: To show your work in such an exceptional museum is a rare opportunity. To be given the chance to hang your paintings in hallowed ground is an honor that one must live up to. I feel that I must earn this gift. It has profoundly challenged me to go beyond what I thought I was capable of as an artist. The collection of paintings for this exhibition must be a representation of the highest level of skill and thought I have gained through years of work and experience.
You frequently ask and compare your process about making work with that of other artists, always stating that you feel like a bit of an outsider. Why do you think that is?
MA: If I were to chart my career path to where I am now, it is quite different from other professional artists in the field. My route was more circuitous and multi-directional. Painting was not the only thing I did and my goal was not to enter the gallery system and actually make a living as an artist. I had other means to support myself and art was just something I did. It was a private passion; a place of calm and respite; a means of expression that I could afford and indulge in, devoid of judgement and public scrutiny. I decided to show my portfolio of work one day to a gallery to get their assessment of some paintings; a product of a month-long stint of painting in Barcelona, Spain. They looked at my work and offered me a one-man show. That was my launch into the art world. But not having to depend on my paintings or the art establishment gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. In that sense I feel like an outsider in a positive and liberating way.
How important is it to you that people like your work?
MA: Does an artist need an audience? When I start a canvas, I am in the front seat, a harsh critic and judge. I perform for myself and require perfection. It is essential that I like my work. I have torn canvases off stretchers many times because the work did not come up to my standards. When the work is finally shown, I watch with curiosity how viewers respond to the painting. It is always gratifying to get a positive response. More than liking the work, it is important to me that the painting is speaking to the person standing in front of it and a sensory dialogue is transpiring. That means that the work is successful in what I intended it to do, communicate with the viewer.
How important is it to you that you sell your work? What does it mean to you?
MA: It is unfortunate that the monetary value of a work of art has become the primary determinant of importance. Whole industries have arisen to support this because of the lucrative nature of the business. I call it the “American Idol” syndrome in the art world. You can market an artist to a certain status to demand a certain price range. If I go by this standard, yes, it feels good to know that someone is willing to pay a lot of money for something I created, an affirmation of good work; but I have also given away work for almost nothing or free because the person really liked it. A genuine appreciation of a piece of work is priceless.
You told me that you were ready to destroy your paintings, but it was your husband that asked you if he could try to organize something with them like putting them in an art fair? How much do you credit your success to this moment in time?
MA: This was a pivotal event. Although I showed my paintings in a few exhibits, I never pursued galleries seriously. I was still painting for myself mainly. Having worked in packaging design for many years in a much smaller dimensional scale, my paintings were, on the other hand, large. I was starting to need more space to store all of them, and the easiest solution was to dispose of existing ones and start new ones. This was a defensive move from my husband who lovingly takes ownership of everything I make including those designated for the fire pit. He figuratively pulled every one of them out from the bonfire and put them up in an art fair. It was a well-attended show, and the paintings were very well received. Almost every painting sold.
How do you know a work is finished?
MA: The painting tells you when to stop. You work continuously on a piece for weeks even months, then one day you can’t put another brushstroke on it. In my particular medium, a tear in the canvas substrate is a fair warning that you have overworked the painting. Then the painting is really “finished” and on its way to the “burn” pile.
You have mentioned that it is gratifying when people like your work, that it is honest. What does that mean?
MA: The highest compliment I remember getting at one of the art fairs was from a man who came to the show. He knew nothing about art, he was unfamiliar with any artist, mediums, techniques, movements, or history. He came to the booth and stood in front of every painting mesmerized. He would leave and come back again and again to do the same. He did not ask questions. He just stared and studied every painting. He came back at the end of the show to thank me and tell me that he loved my paintings best of all. This moment in time is what every artist lives for. My name, my gender, my race, my age, my resume did not matter. He did not ask or want to know. He liked the work! It was all about the work. There was nothing more honest and sincere than his response to my paintings.
Why do you think you make art?
MA: I do not think, I make.